The post-Beaker Celts

Recently up is a piece about the Celts, by Hugh McColl et al.

One coauthor Jean-Paul Demoule is active on X in his belief that the AfD - the patriot party in Germany - is "extreme right". JPD further holds that currently-mainstream conservatives must beware of any alliance with this extreme (because Hitler); in the US, that anyone right of Bernie Saunders is problematic. A French patriot flags JPD as a fraud. It may be fair to question how fair he'd be to any "extremist" in his classroom. However:

For our purpose the most-serious charge must be that Demoule's entire career has been dedicated to deny the very existence of Indo-European people or langage (sic). To translate this ESL from Angry Twitter Bro, it may be that Demoule would introduce some Nuance against classic Aryan Invasion theories, which Gimbutas upgraded to Kurgan Invasion theories, and posthumously Bell Beaker theories. The Bell Beakers are indeed associated with vast male replacement in west Europe (if R1b; Aryan would be R1a). These regions are, in Roman times, found to be Celtic or at least IberoCeltic. But we have some loose-ends. Lusitanian appears to be paraCeltic. Italy hosts, south of the Cisalpine Gaul (and northwest of Messapic and Greek), the Italic languages. They're paraCeltic too. And somewhere in north Britain we have Picts.

The Discussion of the paper associates the Celts/Gauls with Urnfield alias Knovíz. It proposes the Tollense bustup with a Celt defeat in the north; this will be Vendic in postRoman "Migration" times. Late-Bronze Celts did a lot better south and west. For geneticists one problem with Urnfield is, er, the urns - cremated remains don't leave much DNA. Anyway even if somewhat eastern, Celts were not east enough to be majority Aryan/R1a; Celtic invasions did bring some R1a, but remained R1b-dominant.

Given that, I'd suggest one reason Celtic tongues did so well displacing the old Bell Beaker tongues is that they weren't all that different then. Lusitanian if preCeltic looks much like Celtic. A similar pattern will hold as Latin displaces Gaulish - and, perhaps, as Gaulish had displaced the languages in north Italy, which may have been Faliscan in character.

As for Demoule, I propose we don't dismiss his like (or ilk) just because they are antipatriots and bullies. We flag them where they are being antipatriotic bullies. For scholarship it doesn't help in reaction to be a patriotic bully.